Bowdoin College Museum of Art

Preview image of work. brush and black ink on off-white wove paper, Untitled 5701

1964.64

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Untitled

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Artist

Philip Guston (1913 - 1980)

Title

Untitled

Creation Date

1954

Century

20th century

Dimensions

23 9/16 in. x 18 in. (59.85 cm x 45.72 cm)

Object Type

drawing

Creation Place

North America, United States

Medium and Support

brush and black ink on off-white wove paper

Credit Line

Gift of Walter K. Gutman, Class of 1924

Copyright

This artwork may be under copyright. For further information, please consult the Museum’s Copyright Terms and Conditions.

Accession Number

1964.64

Time appears as duration in this drawing’s aggregation of abbreviated brushstrokes that cohere in a dense configuration in the lower part of the page. The expressive strokes trace the movements of the artist’s hand and arm as a record of his presence, a concern also expressed in Guston’s colorful and equally gestural oil paintings of the period. It is characteristic of the nonmimetic style of mark-making for which Guston was best known in the 1950s, when he was most closely aligned with the goals of the Abstract Expressionists. A painter who famously swung from figuration to abstraction and back again, Guston was a devoted draftsman and considered drawing one of the most fundamental creative acts: “It is the bareness of drawing that I like,” he wrote in 1973. “The act of drawing is what locates, suggests, discovers.”